A Cambridge University psychology professor harvested personal data from millions of Facebook users and then passed on that information, much of which was obtained without the users consent, to a political strategy company with links to President Donald Trump’s campaign, Steve Bannon and the billionaire conservative campaign donors Robert and Rebekah Mercer, according to reports from The Guardian and The New York Times.
Aleksandr Kogan, 32, worked with Cambridge Analytica, a Mercer-backed fi...

A database of approximately 593,000 Alaska voter records has been exposed online.
TargetSmart, the company that owns the data, claims that it was not accessed by anyone other than the security researchers on their team and the team that identified the exposure.
Tom Bonier, the Chief Executive Officer of TargetSmart, confirmed the breach and said in a statement that Equals3, a software company based in Minnesota, “Appears to have failed to secure some of their data and some data they license...

Facebook told CNN it is looking into ties between one of its current employees and Cambridge Analytica, the controversial data firm that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign and was suspended by Facebook on Friday.
Joseph Chancellor, now a researcher at Facebook (FB), was a director of Global Science Research, a company that provided data to Cambridge Analytica. The New York Times and The Observer newspaper in London reported Saturday that Cambridge Analytica harvested information...

I'm going to assume that you weren't living in an internet-proof cave this weekend, and caught at least some of the stories about Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. The news first kicked off with the announcement of a data protection lawsuit filed against Cambridge Analytica in the UK on Friday evening (we'll likely have more on that lawsuit soon), followed quickly by an attempt by Facebook to get out ahead of the coming tidal wave by announcing that it was suspending Cambridge Analytica and s...

The Papua New Guinea government is planning to shut down Facebook for a month to understand users' behaviour and safeguard them from fake news.
According to a report in The Post Courier on 28 May, communication minister Sam Basil said the shutdown would enable the department and Papua New Guinea National Research Institute conduct research on how the social networking site is being used by users.
"The time will allow information to be collected to identify users that hide behind fake accoun...

In a video published online in September, a social scientist named Alex Spectre made an earnest pitch for his new startup. Clad in the Silicon Valley uniform of open-collar shirt and blazer, Spectre boasted that his company -- Philometrics -- would revolutionize the way online surveys were done, making it easier for companies to design questionnaires that people would actually respond to on Facebook, Twitter or other sites. Crucially, he said, the surveys could predict the responses for large...

The co-director of a company that harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook users before selling it to the controversial data analytics firms Cambridge Analytica is currently working for the tech giant as an in-house psychologist.
‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower Read more
Joseph Chancellor was one of two founding directors of Global Science Research (GSR), the company that harvested Facebook data using a personality app under the ...

Joey: You don't know what these numbers told you. I'm an expert, and I don't know what these numbers just told you.
Josh: Numbers don't lie.
Joey: They lie all the time.
Numbers lie all the time. Yet the business of numbers is big business. Big data helps companies make better decisions by extracting key insights from piles of information. Polling does the same for politics.
And like big data for business, though results can be ambiguous and notoriously hard to interpret, polls are essent...

Facebook has been rocked by reports of a massive data scrape carried out by Cambridge Analytica and one of its then-contractors, a Cambridge University academic named Aleksandr Kogan. Kogan claims that the data he collected from thousands of Facebook users and their friends—amounting to data on over 50 million users—abided by Facebook’s terms; Cambridge Analytica promises it deleted the data; and Facebook is auditing everyone it can for signs of the data.
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But while Facebook pr...

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in one of the tech giant’s biggest ever data breaches, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Stev...

Peter Saville, founder of 10x Psychometrics, is very clear about the opportunity this role offers: ‘Join us and you’ll have the freedom to use your brain. We’re going places and you’ll go places with us.’
But how, I wondered, will this person find a role working with Peter Saville, who is one of the world’s leading psychometricians, a serial successful entrepreneur and author of over 100 tests. After the success of SHL and Saville Consulting, surely Peter can create a new company’s products ...

The first time I met Christopher Wylie, he didn’t yet have pink hair. That comes later. As does his mission to rewind time. To put the genie back in the bottle.
By the time I met him in person, I’d already been talking to him on a daily basis for hours at a time. On the phone, he was clever, funny, bitchy, profound, intellectually ravenous, compelling. A master storyteller. A politicker. A data science nerd.
Play Video 13:04 Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millio...

Aleksandr Kogan -- who spoke to "60 Minutes" in an interview that aired Sunday -- is the man who developed an app that's at the heart of the Facebook privacy scandal. The social media giant announced last month that it was suspending the University of Cambridge lecturer for violating its policies in 2014.
Kogan served as a director of Global Science Research (GSR) where he used an app to harvest data from as many as 87 million users. Facebook said Kogan claimed the data would only be used fo...